The Birth of Classical Europe: An Interview with Simon Price and Peter Thonemann
- The Birth of Classical Europe: An Interview with Simon Price and Peter Thonemann
THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF EUROPE SERIES HAS GIVEN US a number of excellent volumes, including Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (Viking-Penguin, 2009) and William Chester Jordan’s Europe in the High Middle Ages (Penguin, 2001). Now Viking-Penguin has published the first volume of the series: The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine. Authors Simon Price and Peter Thonemann have emphasized interpretation over strict narrative, and the result is a very unique and intriguing look at classical antiquity. A distinctive feature of their book is its dual focus: looking backward to capture the importance of memory and forward to reveal how more recent times have recalled and appropriated aspects of classical antiquity. Price was a lecturer in Greek and Roman history at Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. He has written and edited a number of books on ancient religions and rituals. Thonemann taught Greek and Roman history at Wadham College, Oxford and has published widely on the history of Asia Minor. He is director of the Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua XI project. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Price and Thonemann in late March.
: It is fair to say that The Birth of Classical Europe is not a standard narrative of the ancient world. Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of the approach to classical antiquity you take in the book?
: We tried to build the book around memories of the past within classical antiquity, the ways in which Greek and Roman peoples understood their own histories. Rather than trying to describe “how it really was” in Greco-Roman antiquity, we are more interested in trying to explain how people thought about their history at the time, and why.
: What prompted you to take this approach?
: We hoped that this would help bring us closer to the mindsets of people in the past. It’s very easy for the omniscient modern historian to say that the Greeks were simply wrong about, say, the early development of the city-state, the Greek polis; they thought that it was a direct continuation from the Mycenean and Minoan palace cultures, while we know (or think we know!) that the polis was an independent development. The interest in studying Greek memory of the early history of the city-state is that it places their self-understanding center stage, and so gets us closer to understanding their world. That ought to make it possible for us to see how the choices they made relate to their own view of their past. This seemed to us a more sympathetic approach than simply to say “Stupid Greeks!”
: Why do you begin with Troy and end with Augustine?
: The Trojan war and the fall of Troy provided Greeks and Romans with their Year Zero—this was the one fixed point in the distant past from which everything else flowed. When the Greeks thought about the origins of their own families or cities, they usually ended up back with the heroes of the Trojan wars, and of course Rome’s own history began (in one version) with the flight of the hero Aeneas from the sack of Troy. So it seemed to make sense for us, too, to start with Troy, not so much because of its historical significance at the time (it was just one of several medium-sized towns on the fringe of the Mycenean and Hittite worlds), but because of its importance in later Greek and Roman memory.
The significance of Troy in both Greek and Roman thought is just one of the reasons why it makes sense to write the histories of the Greek and Roman worlds together. The Greco-Roman world was a historical continuum: the mindset, values, and mythology were all recognizably the same. But the rise of the Church changed all that. The victory of Christianity brought with it a historical mindset: a rejection of the old pagan...
